Did the Clinton Foundation Have a Storefront Accountant Like Madoff?

[Octafish]

Pam Martens and Russ Martens raise THE question.

Did the Clinton Foundation Have a Storefront Accountant Like Madoff?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade: May 24, 2016

A growing number of red flags are cropping up around the charity operation known as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The title tells you right off the bat that there is no anti-nepotism policy in place. Bernie Madoff didn’t believe in an anti-nepotism policy either: his brother, wife, two sons and niece worked for him. That didn’t work out so well for any of them.

What is thus far beyond dispute regarding the Clinton Foundation’s finances is that Hillary Clinton’s political operatives have been on its payroll and that it failed to report tens of millions of dollars in foreign government donations on its 990 tax return to the IRS. As Reuters reported last year:

“For three years in a row beginning in 2010, the Clinton Foundation reported to the IRS that it received zero in funds from foreign and U.S. governments, a dramatic fall-off from the tens of millions of dollars in foreign government contributions reported in preceding years.

“Those entries were errors, according to the foundation: several foreign governments continued to give tens of millions of dollars toward the foundation’s work on climate change and economic development through this three-year period.”

SNIP...

But the Clinton Foundation is no Bernie Madoff accounting operation. According to 13 years of Federal tax returns available for public inspection at the public interest web site for ProPublica, from 2001 through 2012 the Clinton Foundation’s tax returns were prepared by BKD LLP, a national accounting firm that boasts of approximately 2400 employees in 50 U.S. states. That’s a long time not to have an auditor rotation. It also covers the years of 2010, 2011 and 2012 when Reuters reports, and the Foundation has acknowledged, that it failed to report tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments on its Federal tax returns.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/05/did-the-clinton-foundation-have-a-storefront-accountant-like-madoff/

How can someone who has so much money she needs a forensic economist to keep on the right side of the law relate to people busting their chops, paycheck to paycheck?

[grasswire]

1. drip drip

Worse than Watergate, I suspect, by the time this is wide open.

[Octafish]

4. Pam Martens and Russ Martens are pretty fair, too.

So, when they ask to pay attention to somebody...

A Harvard MBA Guy Is Out to Bring Down the Clintons

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 23, 2016

EXCERPT...

There’s a new Markopolos in town with that same brand of leave-no-stone-unturned tenacity and he has his sights set on the charity operations of Hillary and Bill Clinton, known as the Clinton Foundation and its myriad tentacles. Ortel’s actions come just as Hillary Clinton makes her final sprint for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States with Bill in tow as her economic czar. Like Markopolos, Charles Ortel does not mince words.

In a 9-page letter dated yesterday and posted to his blog, Ortel calls the Clintons’ charity the “largest unprosecuted charity fraud ever attempted,” adding for good measure that the Clinton Foundation is part of an “international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward.” Ortel lists 40 potential areas of fraud or wrongdoing that he plans to expose over the coming days.

SNIP...

The charges being made by Ortel are difficult to dismiss as a flight of fancy because mainstream media has tinkered around the edges of precisely what Ortel is now calling out in copious detail.

In a 2013 New York Times article, “Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions,” reporters Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick hint that Hillary Clinton’s political operatives are occupying offices at the Clinton Foundation headquarters, writing that they “will work on organizing Mrs. Clinton’s packed schedule of paid speeches to trade groups and awards ceremonies and assist in the research and writing of Mrs. Clinton’s memoir about her time at the State Department, to be published by Simon & Schuster next summer.”

SNIP...

One notable thing that Charles Ortel is pounding away at is, why, with all of these media red flags for years, the Clintons have been allowed by state charity regulators in multiple states in which they solicit donations as well as their Federal regulator, the IRS, to continue business as usual. Are we looking at the Madoff-effect where regulators are afraid to take on powerful figures?

CONTINUED...

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/05/a-harvard-mba-guy-is-out-to-bring-down-the-clintons/

Remember when Tim Russert observed, "Integrity is for paupers?" Like a Rolex on a freshman rep's wrist, that's a sign.

[Octafish]

14. ENRON thought the world of Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman in Enronland

It has come to this: The investigation of Enron as a political scandal appears for now to depend on Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Enron Democrat who bagged Enron campaign contributions and who worked hard to block accounting reforms. Lieberman's committee agreed to issue subpoenas seeking information that could shed light on Enron contacts with the White House, but the question is, How hard is he willing to push?

CONTINUED...

The guy carried a lot of water for um Wall Street Big Time. Nobody who should have gotten impeached over ENRON cough Bush got touched.

[silvershadow]

16. +1

[truebluegreen]

5. Kick

[Octafish]

15. Phil UBS Gramm's wife built bridge$ from ENRON to BCCI...

Wendy Gramm! Yes, the wonderful wife of that smooth-talking ex-Senator and fun-loving deregulator, Phil Gramm.

Holy smokes! Praise the Loot and Pass the Bank-to-Bank passwords!

After helping deregulate the New Deal protections that had prevented predatory capital backed by the US taxpayer, Phil Gramm hired Bill Clinton and George W Bush for their "Wealth Management" skills at UBS. Small world.

Here's the citation and source from the Federation of American Scientists website. If we've already gone over this, I've gotta go take an aspirin.

CAPCOM

Introduction

In the entire BCCI affair, perhaps no entity is more mysterious and yet more central to BCCI's collapse and criminality than Capcom, a London and Chicago based commodities futures firm which operated between 1984 and 1988. Capcom is vital to understanding BCCI because BCCI's top management and most important Saudi shareholders were involved with the firm. Moreover, Capcom moved huge amounts of money -- billions of dollars -- which passed through the future's markets in a largely anonymous fashion.

Capcom was created by the former head of BCCI's Treasury Department, Ziauddin Ali Akbar, who capitalized it with funds from BCCI and BCCI customers. The company was staffed, primarily, by former BCCI bankers, many of whom had worked with Akbar in Oman and few of whom had any experience in the commodities markets. The major investors in the company were almost exclusively Saudi and were largely controlled by Sheik AR Khalil, the chief of Saudi intelligence. Additionally, the company employed many of the same practices as BCCI, especially the use of nominees and front companies to disguise ownership and the movement of money. Four Americans, Larry Romrell, Robert Magness, Kerry Fox and Robert Powell -- none of whom had any experience or expertise in the commodities markets -- played important and varied roles as frontmen.

While the Subcommittee has been able to piece together the history of Capcom and can point to many unusual and even criminal acts committed by the firm, it still has not been able to determine satisfactorily the reason Capcom was created and the purposes it served for the various parties connected to the BCCI scandal. It appears from the available evidence that Akbar, BCCI, and the Saudis all may have pursued different goals through Capcom, including:

-- misappropriation of BCCI assets for personal enrichment.

-- laundering billions of dollars from the Middle East to the US and other parts of the world.

-- siphoning off assets from BCCI to create a safe haven for them outside of the official BCCI empire.

SNIP...

Despite suspicions about highly unusual transactions, CFTC Chairperson Wendy Gramm told the Subcommittee:

In terms of finding trading violations or Commodity Exchange Act violations that perhaps could support money laundering, we did not find any discernible pattern...o one has ben able to --at least other law enforcement officials have not been able to find money laundering in Capcom US, to our knowledge, as of now.(133)

Money laundering, as Chairperson Gramm testified, is not even a violation of the Commodities Futures Trading Act. Incredibly, it appears that the CFTC and the self-regulatory organizations have never even made a criminal referral for possible money laundering:

Senator Kerry. ave you ever specifically referred, or have any of the exchanges ever made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. We have raised concerns.

Senator Kerry. Have you made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. No. Not-- not specifically in that regard...

Continued...

http://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/21capcom.htm

Original Thread, way back on Old DU (BUSTED LINK):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=7548&forum=DCForumID70&archive=
------------

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3441445&mesg_id=3450080

[truebluegreen]

21. I remember Wendy, but not with much detail.

Thanks for the links, Octafish, as always.

[bobthedrummer]

6. It's their Magical Mystery Tour, the Wizards of Oz and Twilight Zone LLP brother. K&R

It's a Good Life (IMDb)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734580

[Octafish]

17. I still freak out in cornfields...not just Monsanto, but UBS, BCCI, Stephens Inc.

For instance, from his association with a former president, Frank G. got a great deal in Kazakhstan:

After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton

By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
The New York Times, JAN. 31, 2008

EXCERPT...

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

SNIP...

Mr. Giustra foresaw a bull market in gold and began investing in mines in Argentina, Australia and Mexico. He turned a $20 million shell company into a powerhouse that, after a $2.4 billion merger with Goldcorp Inc., became Canada’s second-largest gold company.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html

And from his association with a future president, George W. got a great deal in Bahrain.

Harken Energy And Insider Trading

by Stephen Pizzo
Mother Jones, September / October 1992

EXCERPT...

Harken Energy was formed in l973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a successful covert effort to destabilize Australia's Labor Party government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider. Quasha's father, a powerful attorney in the Philippines, had been a staunch supporter of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. William Quasha had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation.

After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed Junior's struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. The merger immediately opened a financial horn of plenty and reversed Junior's fortunes. But like his brother Jeb, Junior seemed unconcerned about the characters who were becoming his benefactors. Harken's $25 million stock offering in 1987, for example, was underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage house, Stephens, Inc., which placed the Harken stock offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank -- a bank that had surfaced in the scandal that resulted in the downfall of the Australian Labor government in 1976 and, later, in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal. (It was also Union Bank, according to congressional hearings on international money laundering, that helped the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out of the country in private jets, and that was used by Ferdinand Marcos to stash 325 tons of Philippine gold around the world.)

SNIP...

Suddenly, in January 1990, Harken Energy became the talk of the Texas oil industry. The company with no offshore-oil-drilling experience beat out a more-established international conglomerate, Amoco, in bagging the exclusive contract to drill in a promising new offshore oil field for the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain. The deal had been arranged for Harken by two former Stephens, Inc., brokers. A company insider claims the president's son did not initiate the deal -- but feels that his presence in the firm helped with the Bahrainis. "Hell, that's why he's on the damn board," the insider says. "...You say, 'By the way, the president's son sits on our board.' You use that. There's nothing wrong with that."

Junior has told acquaintances conflicting stories about his own involvement in the deal. He first claimed that he had "recused" himself from the deal; "George said he left the room when Bahrain was being discussed 'because we can't even have the appearance of having anything to do with the government.' He was into a big rant about how unfair it was to be the president's son. He said, 'I was so scrupulous I was never in the room when it was discussed.'"

Junior alternately claimed, to reporters for the Wall Street Journal and D Magazine, that he had opposed the arrangement. But the company insider says, to the contrary, that Junior was excited about the Bahrain deal. "Like any member of the board, he was thrilled," the associate says. "His attitude was, 'Holy shit, what a great deal!'"

CONTINUED...

http://www.georgewalkerbush.net/harkenenergyandinsidertrading.htm

Small world.

[truedelphi]

7. Why, no! It is a Charity, and it is for the Children!

So what if in his final days inside the White House, Bill Clinton handed out favors like a soccer mom at her toddler's two year old B-day Party.

I mean, surely there was no quid pro quo from people like arch economic criminal Marc Rich.

Why wouldn't any human being in the Oval Office just happen to pardon one of the most nefarious economic gangsters since Al Capone? Certainly Mr Rich did not then go on to hand over some subtly appreciative gesture of several millions of dollars a few subtle years after the pardon.

And we are confident that no such transactions ever happened, as our illustrious fleet of Fourth Estate protectors, such as Jeff Bezos' hand picked reporters at the Washington Post, took the time in Spring 2015 to do a most skeptical expose of the Clinton Foundation. These "reporters" came up with a story quite reminiscent of how the FBI acted back in Nixon's time. Given the absolute total lack of underhandedness and total Charitable Intentions of the Clintons, and this being reported by the Washington Post, surely we can now all relax!

And it is all so very very deja vu!

Remember the White House then telling us Baby Boomers how the FBI "independently" devoted several trillion hours of investigation into Watergate, and after that thorough examination, the FBI came up with the statement that everything was fine and dandy! The White House went on to say that they were pleased with the FBI's findings and tht Nixon himself would be seeing to it that everyone involved got a promotion!

[LiberalArkie]

8. K&R

[TIME TO PANIC]

9. K & R!

[truedelphi]

10. BTW, did you get to see the opening skit on Saturday Night live, last Saturday

Amazing performance by a cast member and Larry David, as HRC and Bernie.

And both characters shout out "It is rigged!"

Also very funny...

[Skwmom]

24. SNL is in the bag for Clinton.

[truedelphi]

35. Oh the head guy Lorne is, but whoever wrote

The opening skit definitely is not.

[thereismore]

11. Charles Ortel

http://charlesortel.com/a-deep-dive-into-how-the-clinton-foundation-operates-illegally-and-in-haiti

"The Clinton Foundation, directed by certain individuals and together with numerous affiliates, has been part of an international charity fraud network whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion, measured from 1997 forward. "

[MrMickeysMom]

12. 13 years is a long time not to have an auditor rotation...

But the Clinton Foundation is no Bernie Madoff accounting operation. According to 13 years of Federal tax returns available for public inspection at the public interest web site for ProPublica, from 2001 through 2012 the Clinton Foundation’s tax returns were prepared by BKD LLP, a national accounting firm that boasts of approximately 2400 employees in 50 U.S. states. That’s a long time not to have an auditor rotation. It also covers the years of 2010, 2011 and 2012 when Reuters reports, and the Foundation has acknowledged, that it failed to report tens of millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments on its Federal tax returns.

It's a sign of sloppy accounting principles, or deception NOT to rotate the auditor as a fiduciary responsibility to the management of municipal funds. And, as we all know, the Clinton are not stupid.

And, I'm not supposed to wonder about this, since I'm a woman, yet criticized by other women for not supporting HRC. This stinks.

[Skwmom]

26. Preparing a tax return for an entity is not the same as auditing it. Was the Foundation audited?

[MrMickeysMom]

27. This is about the auditors being rotated, and the article will detail how it was...

... It makes the case for having a different auditor (I would say every 3 years). You don't want to have a long term relationship with just ONE auditor. It's suggestive of non-transparency with the books. It's also adheres to the principles of good business.

[Skwmom]

30. There are businesses that have the same auditors year after year (though changing could certainly

raise some issues which is why they don't change).

I read the article. It talks about tax returns than switches to audit. They are not interchangeable. Maybe the same firm provided both tax and audit services but the article does not state that.

[MrMickeysMom]

31. As a good business practice, and local governments SWITCH them on purpose

There probably are some who never or hardly switch. It's a sign that the books aren't following what are best practices for the avoidance of hiding things.

Yes, I'd guess that some don't change because some issues might be best NOT raised, eh?

[nenagh]

13. K&R

Thank you for grouping these posts...

[RobertEarl]

18. Another Octafish crusher

Thanks, man. Let's hope that justice is done. So much water over the dam these last few decades. I wish the dam would just go ahead and break so we the People can finally catch a break.

[jwirr]

19. Don't they usually use some small Arkansas firm to do their

banking? Out of sight out of mind?

[JEB]

20. K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links.

[7wo7rees]

22. K n R

Thanks Octafish. +1000
And to all other contributors.

Wish we knew what we could do to help to get more coverage. Also wish more here at DU cared. 😞

[Skwmom]

23. There are always accounting whores to be had for the right price. The system ensures it.

With that said, hiring someone to perform a tax return is different from hiring someone to perform an audit.

I know of a situation where a firm was hired to do an audit. The client didn't like what the auditors found regarding huge write-downs of asset valuations so the client said, don't worry about the audit, we just needed numbers for the tax return.

Where the foundation records ever audited?

[creeksneakers2]

29. Yes

First by a small Arkansas firm but later by a national outfit.

[Skwmom]

32. The small Arkansas firm definitely raises red flags with the Clintons ties to Arkansas though the

national outfit doesn't mean much. As I said, there are plenty of accounting whores to be had for the right price and a lot of idiots to staff the jobs (oblivious to what is really going on).

[creeksneakers2]

33. True

But if something looks shaky you ask for an audit. If you don't believe audits, how can anybody ever clear their name? No matter what, the accusers always say guilty.

[Skwmom]

34. Their website says it was audited (though many audits aren't worth the paper they are written on).

[brentspeak]

25. The real issue has always been the Clinton Foundation

The Clintons are probably glad Benghazi and the emails are there to take the focus away from what really should be discussed.

[creeksneakers2]

28. This has nothing to do with Madoff

[Octafish]

36. It's got everything to do with Madoff. From accountants who hide the facts...

...like the ones who swore all the money was accounted for, except for the late filings from overseas, to determining the financial futures of people and nations.

[2banon]

37. Excellent post, once again!